Altruism & Fulfilling the Void
Since I was little, I’ve had this pull to help people feel seen. To make them feel special. To help, in whatever small way I could.
And for a long time, as I got older, I started to view it as a flaw. I told myself I was a people-pleaser. A martyr. Just doing it for the attention, the approval, the gold star. I became disgusted with that trait in myself.
Turns out I misunderstood the whole thing. Because I’m autistic, I never recognized that what I was feeling wasn’t people-pleasing at all.
It was my need for justice.
When you feel everything — when other people’s discomfort lands in your own body like weather — helping isn’t a choice you make to be liked. It’s a compulsion toward rightness. Toward easing a wrongness you can physically feel. I wasn’t chasing approval. I was chasing equilibrium. I was trying to make the world match the fairness I could see so clearly and feel so acutely.
For years I shamed myself for something that was actually moral clarity.
And here’s the question I had to sit with: how many of us are taught that our purest instincts are our defects?
How many kind, feeling children were told their softness was a weakness — and grew up burying the best part of themselves to survive?
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Because it goes deeper than just me. When someone relaxes, I feel instantly lighter. Warmer. When someone smiles, something in me loosens. Their light lights me. That’s not martyrdom. That’s connection. That’s the most human thing there is.
The question I’m living with now is simple: How can I best serve people?
Not persuade them. Not make them think highly of me. No pathos, no ethos — not even logos. Just genuine love and help, offered without keeping score. Nothing to prove. It’s no longer about me.
Because when you serve from the void — trying to fill a hole only you can feel — you’re not really helping anyone. You’re extracting. You’re feeding the me-me-me loop in a nicer outfit. But when you serve from fullness, from the simple truth that seeing someone else’s light makes yours brighter, that’s not self-sacrifice. That’s how we were built. That’s the community the matrix keeps telling you to fear.
I’ve spent enough of my life ashamed of my softest instinct. I’m done apologizing for it.
So here’s my note for today. Do one thing for someone else — with no audience. No post, no proof, no praise. Feel how it lands. That feeling is the whole economy the fear-based world can’t sell you.
How can I best serve people?
Not for the attention. For an answer.
Signed,
Mystic in the Matrix
